You haven’t heard a whole lot lately about the network neutrality debate that was widely covered in the press months ago. Aside from the FTC conference discussing the topic last week, in which nothing new was really talked about, the topic seems to have disappeared from people’s minds that I speak to.

Someone gave me a call the other day and asked why StreamingMedia.com has not delivered a strong opinion on the matter on our website aside from the articles we have written about the subject. While I have always had a strong opinion on it and feel that neutrality is crucial, it’s also important for our readers to know that nearly no one will talk to us on record about it. To me, this is a big mistake. Too many companies are willing to tell me off-the-record about how it will hurt them but they won’t make that info public. If you think this is really bad for your business, which is would be, then stand up and make that clear in a public forum. Better yet, get together all of the other vendors in the industry and pool your press and media resources to get the word out to the media and tell them just how bad this is for your business and for consumers.

Many network companies are all working together to try and make this idea sound rationale and so far, only the big guys like Google, Yahoo! etc… are the only ones publicly opposing this. The smaller guys have just as much say in this if not more. To the vendors I say, how long are you going to wait before you start to really fight this? There is strength in numbers and the time is now.

We have some great sessions at the Streaming Media East show in May talking about Internet TV.

One of the sessions, moderated by Jose Castillo (who has a great blog at thinkjose.com) will discuss how AppleTV, TiVo, Slingbox, and a host of other hardware and software products are starting to deliver new media content from the Web to TVs. The session will discuss what latest devices are being used to deliver consumer content and how content creators big and small are utilizing these new tools. Also discussed will be how online content is being treated differently from traditional broadcast content and what potential business models are being created for the monetization of consumer content. The panelists include:

– Tara Maitra, VP, GM, Programming, TiVo
– Bijan Sabet, General Partner, Spark Capital
– Jim Funk, VP, Marketing, Akimbo
– Fred McIntyre, SVP, AOL Video

What topics or points would you like to see discussed at this session? Please include them in the comments section.

That’s the question that’s answered in an MSNBC.com article by Michael Rogers. There’s nothing new in the article we haven’t heard before in regards to the factors that stop the progress in the U.S., but the article is a good read none the less. Some of the factors Michael talks about are:

• "Early on, most of the world decided to all use the same technical standard — GSM — for their mobile phones.  In many countries, the government actually enforced that decision. In the U.S., on the other hand, free enterprise ruled and multiple standards competed, with GSM initially only a small part of the market."

• "…high-speed cell phone networks — generically called 3G — are finally rolling out across the U.S., with Web surfing at speeds approaching that of home DSL (assuming customers are willing to pony up for the new services).  But there may also be some price competition to keep those services affordable: this year, a new technology service called WiMAX will appear, initially from Sprint and a start-up called Clearwire."

• "Another kind of new signal is coming to U.S. cell phones this year: direct broadcast television. In the U.S., Verizon will be the first to introduce this new television service later this year, and in Barcelona AT&T announced they will do the same. The good news is that unlike the early days of the U.S. cell phone market, both carriers will actually use the same technology, which should make a bigger market for cool handsets.  The bad news is that, once again, the Americans have chosen a form of mobile TV broadcast that’s different than the one most of the rest of the world has adopted, so it could be a bit like the GSM situation revisited."

Michael sums it all up by saying "While choice is generally a good thing, it has unquestionably slowed progress."

I think I have to agree. What I wish the carriers in the U.S. would tell us is real numbers for video usage on their networks. If they are not going to share them, then stop trying to tell us how successful your service is. Because every time I ask for real data and numbers, the response I always get back from them is a response like "it’s wildly successful".

I’ve been a Verizon FiOS customer for over a year now and I have to say I am still amazed at how good it is and how good a job Verizon does at supporting it. I know, it sounds odd to say a phone company is good at anything, and over the years I have had nightmares with Verizon for DSL. But when it comes to their FiOS offering, it really does seem too good to be true.

For those who don’t know, FiOS is Verizon’s fiber-optic technology where they run a dedicated fiber line from the street into your house. In my town in Westchester it currently supports only data and voice  but in other cities around the country, it also supports Verizon TV. A year ago, I signed up at $45 a month for 15MB down and 3MB up. About 6 months after it was installed, Verizon upgraded me to 20MB down and 5MB up – at no charge. Since when do phone companies give away anything for free?!? If you ever need to call tech support, you get a special number that puts you directly in touch with the special FiOS department. I’ve called support 3-4 times over the year with various random questions, (not service outages) and every time I got someone who truly knows what they are doing and they even knew how to support a Mac user!

At the end of Q4 of 2006, Verizon had 687,000 FiOS customers out of the 4.8 million homes that can get FiOS for a penetration rate of 14 percent. While that is not a lot of households when it comes to market penetration, imagine what FiOS can do for content owners when adoption truly takes off and more people become aware of the service. Content companies will then have the ability to mesh TV and Internet video distribution on a real scale. Verizon could very easily and very quickly become a content syndicator capable of reaching consumers that it knows has the ability to consume high-quality video. Today, we all talk about "broadband" video as being this great high-quality file yet it is typically encoded at 300Kbps or 500Kbps, which is nothing if you have a 20MB connection. I can’t even find any content encoded above 750Kbps and feel like I’m only getting 10% of what my connection is capable of.

For any product or service to be truly adopted by the masses it needs to be easy to understand, cheap, easy to buy and have good support. So far, Verizon truly has all of this with its FiOS service. 20MB fiber connection for $45 a month? Many people pay more than that for DSL or cable for speeds ranging from 3-6MB. I can’t wait till FiOS does some content deals and I’m able to see videos encoded at a couple of Megs a second.

I think FiOS is a service to really watch over the next few years. It is the one Internet offering above anything else that truly has the ability to change the market for consumers and content owners. Do you have Verizon FiOS? Are you as happy with it as I am?

The American Advertising Federation released a report last week that says 73% of U.S. companies say They’ll advertise in new media. Some of the findings:

• Seventy-three percent of respondents said that one to twenty percent of their budget is reserved for experimentation and new media properties. Significant, however, is the finding that 12.37 percent of respondents list 21 to 40 percent of their budget as reserved for these items.

• In 2006, the most expected innovations in the media landscape were 1) the availability of TV programs on the Internet, 2) the mass adoption of text messaging in the United States, and 3) the importance of social media/networking as part of the communications plan.

The real question is, what percentage of that will be allocated to media that incorporates online video? What numbers are you seeing?

This one has me stumped. I know this was announced in Q4 of last year, but I’ve just being doing some reading up on the service and frankly, I don’t get it. Who in the U.S. is going to pay to watch a two-hour movie on their cell phone? We all know that short videos to mobile devices, for the right application has some potential. But full-length movies? When are technology companies going to understand that just because you can do something technically, does not mean that consumers want it? All that matters is what’s adopted and there is no way consumers in the U.S. are going to adopt the idea of watching full-length movies on a mobile. They don’t even watch movies downloaded to a PC in any large quantity.

That being said, what applications are you seeing in the market for short videos to mobile that does show promise and has some traction?

A few days ago, I added a new session to the upcoming Streaming Media East show in May that’s going to talk to p2p distribution and whether or not it will ever have any mass-market adoption in the U.S. I’d love to hear in the comments section what you think the session should focus on. What are the p2p topics that people need to know about?

Here’s my thinking. I don’t know of any company besides the movie studios who use p2p to distribute content. And the only sales pitch I ever get from p2p vendors is that it "reduces the cost of bandwidth". Is that really all they have to sell? Reducing cost? And if so, why haven’t more companies adopted it? What is reporting like when it comes to p2p delivery? Does it support live streaming? I’m no p2p expert, but for all the talk I hear of p2p, I still can’t name any customers who actually use it. And no matter who I ask, they don’t know of any companies either besides the movie industry using BitTorrent, which launches it’s legit video store when?

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Update: Christopher Levy from the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) just let me know about the organization and what they are up to. The DCIA is a voluntary organization representing all sectors of the distributed computing industry. This includes content providers, software developers and distributors, and service-and-support companies. The DCIA is engaged in developing standards-and-practices to advance this innovative consumer-based distribution channel. Good to see, I didn’t know they existed.